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Carolina Friends School is a vibrant and inclusive learning community empowering students to think critically, creatively, and independently. Explore how your family can become part of our community of learners.

Community

At Carolina Friends School, community is formed and found in ways both big and small. Personal relationships are at the core of our work, and we greatly value the connection of our family and staff as well as our partnerships in the broader community.

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Carolina Friends School has relied on the enthusiasm and gifts of its supporters and community members from its founding. Discover how you can further our mission and impact current and future students.

In This Section

Middle and Upper School Library

Our library is designed to support academic research and reading for pleasure. Our physical collection includes more than 6,000 books, DVDs and periodicals. Additionally, the library houses a Mac lab with nine computers, and we have five Macs in the main library space. Fourteen Chromebooks and a variety of multi-media equipment are also available for checkout.

The library is open Monday through Friday 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. Ruffin is always happy to assist students and teachers in finding the information or resources they need!

Reading Guides

Tons of reviews and excerpts of YA (Young Adult) books, as well as adult titles that are appropriate for a teen audience. Features include Cool New Books, Word of Mouth (a forum where teens talk about what they’re reading), author interviews, biographies, contests, and free giveaways. Check out the annually updated Teen Reads Ultimate Reading List of more than 450 titles!

YALSA stands for Young Adult Library Services Association. Each year a group of librarians read a whole lot of books and watch a whole lot of movies to find the best books and media of each year. The result is a handy list of the best of the best for teen readers and viewers.

We Need Diverse Books™ is a grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people. The website includes lots of resources to help readers find books with diverse characters.

The Rainbow Book List is released every January and includes quality books with significant and authentic GLBTQ content, recommended for readers from birth through 18 years of age. The list is a joint project of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table and the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association.

Sweet Search: A Search Engine for StudentsSweet Search is a search engine designed specifically for students. It culls through 35,000+ sites which have been determined to be credible sources of information by research experts and librarians. While it's true that you will find many of the same sites in a Google search, you won't find all of the extra stuff, and Sweet Search will put the most relevant (not the most popular — there's a difference!) at the top. Try it — you might like it!

SIRS DiscovererGeneral reference database primarily for LS and MS students and teachers.Password required off campus; email a librarian if you don't already know it.

CulturegramsProQuest products are designed to support the widespread, integrated, sustained, and effective (WISE) use of technology to help K-12 schools and public libraries develop educators' skills and improve student achievement at every grade level.

Data.govEasy to find, download, and use datasets generated and held by the U.S. Federal Government. Includes geospatial data.

North Carolina Digital CollectionsMore than 90,000 historic and recent photographs, state government publications, letters, manuscripts, and other resources on all kinds of topics related to North Carolina. Collections include Family Records, Federal and State Constitutional Materials, NC Senate Audio, NC Newspapers, Civil War, World War I, Civil Rights, STEM Archives, and much more. All are free to access and most are full-text searchable. A great place for local primary sources!

Library of CongressLOTS of digital collections of historic photographs, films, maps, newspapers, documents, and more. Browse by topic or search for a specific subject. A small sampling of a few top choices:

American Memory - More than 7 million digital items relating to the history and culture of the United States.

AncestryK12 Offers a no-cost program for K12 schools that includes access to content from Fold3, Newspapers.com and the U.S. collection of Ancestry.

CulturegramsProQuest products are designed to support the widespread, integrated, sustained, and effective (WISE) use of technology to help K-12 schools and public libraries develop educators' skills and improve student achievement at every grade level.

Digital Public Library of AmericaOffers a single point of access to millions of items —photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more — from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.

Digital SchomburgA division of the New York Public Library, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is devoted to the preservation of materials on the global black experience. Includes photographs, prints, books, articles, video, oral histories, and more.

EuropeanaSearch engine for the digitized collections of museums, libraries, archives and galleries across Europe.

Internet ArchiveEvolving archive of Internet sites and other digital cultural artifacts. Home of the Wayback Machine, which allows you to see what a website looked like years or months ago.

Encyclopedia of LifeFree online resource bringing together information, supplied by authoritative sources, about all life on Earth in text, images, video, sounds, maps, classifications and more. Also has resources for educators, Google Earth tours, podcasts, and other cool stuff.

National Library of MedicineScience DirectFull-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from nearly 2,500 journals and 26,000 books.

This section contains a collection of materials to help you better understand copyright, fair use and plagiarism. And remember:

Even if a source is copyright-friendly, you still need to cite it.

Our librarians are always available to answer any and all of your questions about research, citations and digital use.

A few important definitions:

copyright: the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of something (as a literary, musical, or artistic work)

fair use: a legal doctrine that portions of copyrighted materials may be used without permission of the copyright owner provided the use is fair and reasonable, does not substantially impair the value of the materials, and does not curtail the profits reasonably expected by the owner

plagiarize: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own; to use (another's production) without crediting the source

The Plagiarism Spectrum: Tagging 10 Types of Unoriginal Work

"Identifies 10 types of plagiarism based on findings from a worldwide survey of nearly 900 secondary and higher education instructors. Each type of plagiarism is given a digital moniker to reflect the significant role that the internet and social media play in student writing."Worth a look!http://turnitin.com/assets/en_us/media/plagiarism_spectrum.php

Flowchart for Understanding Plagiarism

This handy flowchart is brought to you by EasyBib.com, which has many free guides to understanding research and citation practices. As you may know, EasyBib is also an excellent tool for creating citations and bibliographies — and every CFS student and staff member has an EasyBib account! For more info, come talk to a librarian.

Carolina Friends School

Carolina Friends School is a vibrant and inclusive learning community empowering students to think critically, creatively, and independently. We foster active exploration and quiet reflection, individual endeavor and collaborative engagement. Inspired by Quaker values — pursuit of truth, respect for all, peaceful resolution of conflict, simplicity, the call to service — we teach our children that it is possible to change the world.